


Mal Tourné

by Neurtsy



Category: One Direction (Band), Zayn Malik (Musician)
Genre: Alien Biology, Aliens, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Alternate Universe - Scientists, Blood and Gore, Creature Fic, Gore, Human Experimentation, Medical Experimentation, Other, Pregnancy, Science Experiments, Science Fiction, Sex Change, Unplanned Pregnancy, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-18
Updated: 2016-05-18
Packaged: 2018-06-09 07:50:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6896422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neurtsy/pseuds/Neurtsy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A facility of scientists perform an estranged experiment: injecting an alien strain of DNA into live human subjects. When one subject goes rogue, all scientists, surgeons, and other test subjects working on the secret project are attacked and killed by the hybrid creature they created. All but one - the sole scientist who showed the creature any kindness and mercy. What happens after the slaughter? An interesting development.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mal Tourné

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Candle_wick](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Candle_wick/gifts).



> So. Well. First of all, your prompts were amazing and unique and interesting, and I wish that I had more time than I had to work on this, and expand it into something better.  
> This was heavily inspired by B class monster movies and science fiction short stories from the 80's. I think it belongs in a short anthology of other alien/sci fi/monster shorts.

_Entry 369. 04/13. Subjects 1 through 14 rejected the serum. Subjects 15 through 34 responding. Stable._

_Entry 421. 04/27. Subjects 15 through 18 rejected the bonding sequence. Subjects 19 through 34 responding. Stable._

_Entry 433. 04/29. Subjects 19 through 22, 25, 30, 32 rejected surgery. Subjects 23, 24, 26 through 29, 31, 33, 34 responding. Stable._

_Entry 464. 05/02. Subjects 23, 24, 28, 33, 34 systems failed. Dissection and records set. Subjects 26, 27, 29, 31 responding. Stable._

_Entry 480. 05/10. Subjects 27, 29 systems failed. Dissection and records set. Subjects 26, 31 passed final system exams. Positive readings for pheromone components. XX employees denied for observation and administration._

_Subject change Log. 26;N, 31;H._

_Entry 512. 05/15. Employee ZM assigned observation and administration for subject N. Employee LP assigned observation and administration for subject H._

_Employee Log Admin ZH. 05/30  
N is responding positively to pelagic additives. Blood work sent to lab for further confirmation. _

_N successfully completed problem solving rubric._

_Structural system tested negatively for pathogens._

_Employee Log Admin ZH. 06/16  
N has completed required testing. Final operation scheduled for 06/17 13:00. Preparations for surgery conducting._

 

 

 

The entries stop. A screen flickers, splintered cracks lighting up the bottom half of the monitor, pixels shuddering with water damage, programmed to resemble lined paper.

The air smells hot and copper soaked, and the ceiling tiles drip. 

Globby red droplets fall onto the ruined floor, and bleed weakly across a fallen administrator sheet. The words _Employee Log Admin ZH_ lay scattered and bloody on the floor where they fell from shaking arms. 

Still attached to the shaking arms, a man sits sprawled across the floor like a propped ragdoll. 

A matte red spatter is drying and congealing on the identification badge clipped around his neck, and it smears pulpy beneath his fingers when he reaches up to touch it, fingers moving in a daydream, acid rising from his stomach to his mouth. 

His eyes, glazed over and wet, blink once, and his vision is shot across the room. 

They take in the chaos in snapshot-like glimpses. Dismemberment, and carelessly thrown entrails, all purple, white, and horrible. 

He wretches up onto the floor, but all that comes up is yellowish froth that burns his throat. 

 

There’s a body, almost within reach, the administration card the halfway mark on the floor between them. 

He stretches out, passing over the initials of his own name that look unfamiliar and wrong. He attempts to raise an arm to reach out, and tap the other on the shoulder. But then the angle of sight changes and he can see the skull of the man is barely attached to his body, just strings and strands of neck tendon holding it in place.

The face is entirely unrecognizable, all sunken in, and the sight makes him wretch again, this time only dry heaving, spine twisting and wrenching itself out of place.

All around him is the same kind of disarray. Bloody parts just scattered and splayed open against the tiles, once grey and gleaming. Now coated with grime and innards and excrement. 

Some of the parts are ones the man can dully recognize through the gibbering screaming car crash happening inside his skull. A chunk of face he used to share drinks with after hours, a scalp now red-rich and wet, of hair he used to watch get tucked by fingers behind an ear. A wristwatch now battered and stuck on the time of impact. A simple silver wedding band on a finger no longer attached to a hand. 

There’s nothing left inside his guts or stomach to offer up to the mess on the floor, but his body tries, once more with feeling. 

After the heaving, he freezes. A sound, something apart from his own sodden shoes scraping against intestinal lining coiled on the floor. His ears pick up the noise and cradle it, trying to dissect, and pinpoint its origins. His mind is spinning the room, around and around before his eyes, a bleached out red-grey carousel. 

The sound swells. Molten wet feet on tiles smack and slide grotesquely, and the man stiffens, vertebrae gritting together. The sound of footsteps glistening through his ear canals, and the skin on his neck screeches, pulling tight, the hairs all up and screaming.

Raw instinct links hands with panic and nausea. He can imagine a drill sergeant, a chief commander, a man in uniform, screaming in his ear to _fall back, retreat._ And a deeper command from inside his nerves - _hide._ The word starts to scream so loud inside his head, he can imagine spittle flying from lips, the quiver of a tongue as it keeps on insisting. 

 

 _Hide._

 

He’s out in the open. The closest thing to cover comes in the form of the slaughtered bodies of his colleagues, and he can’t bring himself to crawl inside a corpse. His eyes escape the carnage and fall again on the administration badge before him.

 _‘Dr.,’_ it reads, and settles over him. His brain starts coughing up the names of muscles and bones he can see, littering the floor. 

_‘Zain,’_ follows just after, and it looks like a mistake, a false identity, but the letters seem to sink into his skin, all the while that voice inside his head begging him to make himself scarce. So out in the open, craving caves, or high treetops.

Then, _‘Mal’_ \- and a chunk of fragmented skull and snotty blood, erasing what was left of his name, and what feels like his sanity alongside it. 

 

 _Mal,_ and the footsteps come to a slippery, gritting stop. 

 

 _Mal,_ and the silence is such a wrongness to match. 

 

He - and he must be Zain - finally lifts the deadweights of his eyes to the doorway of the wide open room, all filled with meat and stains. Soon to be decay.

Something horrible is standing in the doorway, head lowered and hackles raised, lips pulled back from its teeth, breathing in all the death in the air. 

Humanoid, barely. A collar of red clotting and tacking all over its neck and down its shoulders. Spines and tendrils forking and shifting from behind it. Moving as if they’re sniffing out the currants in the air. 

A spike of damp adrenaline and pure terror jolts through Zain’s body, an electrical gasp, and the spines seem to stiffen. Zain stiffens too. Vermin, caught and held in the eye of some wicked and awful bird of prey. 

The bird in the doorway takes a wicked and awful step into the room, bloody and crowded, and awful, wicked. 

Zain’s been caught. His spine knows it, and melts into the floor. His brain and hands know it too, and refuse to admit it, and give in. They both scramble, hands against the floor, searching for a grip, something to haul himself backwards and away. His brain against his skull, fevered and wracking. 

 

The creature’s eyes are caught and rambling all over him, golden glazed and horrible. Zain can’t wrap his senses around his ribcage, or allow it to expand and let in any air. Instead, he closes his eyes and finds himself taken back to his first day on the assignment. 

⌘

The skylights are allowing in heavy rays of sunlight. It’s late afternoon and his assigned subject is seated and strapped in with arm restraints. 

The subject isn’t straining to be freed. Instead, it’s trying on a smile. A mask of cheer to lay atop the undercurrents of fear, applied like cheap powder.

 

Zain isn’t sure if it can still be called _‘the subject,’_ even in his memory. Its DNA and structuring is still human. They haven’t administrated any of the injections yet. It’s just a young man, someone who initialed documents and knew the risks. He’s barely younger than Zain. 

 

He introduces himself brusquely. His initials, his involvement. It’s a display of authority, control and stability. The subject smiles, lips over teeth, and it’s docile. He attempts to offer a name in return, but he’s cut off after the first syllable. 

“That’s not necessary. We have your subject code - ” it’s emblazoned on the chest of his shirt. A block lettered 26. Zain says it exactly as he’s rehearsed, and as he’s been instructed to. It slithers out just as cold and scaly as he’s been expecting, but the expression on the subject’s face doesn’t twist into something hurt or angry. Instead, he shrugs mildly - as much as his restraints allows.

“It’s Niall, anyway,” he says, just as mildly, and Zain has to fight an itching smile off his face. The subject notices, and offers up a look that’s almost bashful. Sheepish, and belly-up.

⌘

A blink, a breath, and Zain’s back in the wretched room. His lungs slowly start to re-inflate, and his eyes begin to focus. All they have to focus on is gristle and tissue and gore, or the thing, still standing in the doorway, idle. 

He choose to risk a glance at it. He isn’t certain if the memory was one that had resurfaced naturally - if triggered by stress and fear could classify - or if the thing in the doorway had something more to do with it. 

It stands, still watching him, a dark and deep expression caught dancing in its eyes, like shadows falling across a wall from candlelight. 

It looks at him, and he looks back at it, and feels a tightening in his guts, a slick bone-deep and chilling recognition of the strange expression in its eyes. Golden and bloody-cornered, but matching in intensity to wide and blue eyes that had looked at him before, strapped in to a chair in a laboratory room. 

The creature’s face isn’t sheepish or belly-up anymore. The eyes are still all over Zain, fixing with intent across his face. 

 

 _“Subject - ”_ There comes a harsh and yellow narrowing of the creature’s eyes as the word scrapes its way up from being stuck way down Zain’s throat. 

“Subject 26 - ” he tries again, his throat and words still all rough like asphalt. There’s a flicker in the creature’s eyes, a ripple of recognition and intelligence that drives a steel rod of terror through Zain’s abdomen. 

“Are you still in there?” Zain tries again, hopelessness playing cat’s cradle inside his intestines. The lantern yellow eyes roll thick and fix on his face again. This time there’s an oval of pale blue, ghosting behind the irises. 

“Do you remember?” Zain asks. Common sense and rationality up and flee his body, and he inches his feet forward along the wet tiles. “Do you remember me?”

The thing swings its head to look at him, dead-on. Zain can see the bulging of its skull, something pressing outwards from within, too large for its casing, and the skin and bone misshaping. 

A ripple comes through the air, either inside the heaving room, or inside Zain’s head, and he finds himself blinking once again, breaking their connected gaze, and finding himself somewhere in the month’s passed.

 

⌘

“I like when you’re here for tests,” Niall says one day. There’s a tube tucked into his hand, attached to a drip, and Zain is struggling to keep his thoughts neutral. There are lapses in continuity of referring to him as _the subject_ in his head. 

“Why’s that?” he asks absentmindedly, filling out the chart tucked into the bottom of the bed. 

“You talk to me,” the subject responds, and Zain administers a mental slap on his own wrist.

“I’m not supposed to,” he replies, and is rewarded with a soft scoff, friendly around the edges. 

“Well I appreciate it,” the subject says, and Zain sighs as he readies a fluid system injection. 

“Slight pinch now,” he says in lieu of conversation, and swabs the subject’s inner elbow with a smear of alcohol. 

“That’s another reason,” the subject says and Zain eases the needle into his vein. Zain _hm’s_ questioningly. “Most of the other doctors don’t treat me so gently.”

“Your pain receptors are still in tact, and flinching could muddy the results,” Zain says, slabbing indifference on thickly. 

“Of course,” the subject replies with a coarse laugh. “I still appreciate it.” Something in his tone suggests to Zain that he’s not buying his coldness. He leaves it, instead of encouraging him to change his mind. 

⌘

 

He’s thrown back into the present again, and finds himself shaken, either by his own rememberings, or something encouraged; brought on by the presence of the demon-bodied thing standing so near to him. It feels as if voluntary thought is coming and leaving him like waves, like sea currents.

Zain risks another glance at the stalking figure to his left, eyes searching for comparisons between it and the subject he had visited in memory. 

There’s nothing left of calmness overtop a nervous demeanor. The light is coming in the same way from the skylights - pale and weightless - but the way it’s falling on skin has changed. The subject moves beneath the light, and instead of light and barely-freckled skin, it’s lit up all pallid, grey-tinged and gleaming.

 

There’s a smell that Zain can’t place, something new that hadn’t been there in the facility before. Low and hot and laced with musk and copper. It’s a flitting distraction from the carnage strewn about, and the headache swirling through his sinuses.

The creature turns, hackles still up and awful. Now graced with a back-view, Zain recoils. The tendrils and horn-like structures protruding from its back have split the skin, warping and latching on to the exposed muscle beneath. At the base, the tendrils are still red and wet, looking like raw meat. They creep almost tentatively through the air, testing out their path, as if searching for something.

The sunlight seeps into the cracks of ripped flesh, and Zain can see faint bubbling and the sudden smell of singed hair. The creature hisses, a heavy, lethal sound, and swarms in a sideways motion into a more shadowed corner.

 

“It’s alright,” Zain whispers into the godlessness of the room. The creature’s head is swinging low with burning eyes, following the off-kilter rays of light smiling down from the skylight. 

_“Is it?”_ the creature whispers back, with a voice deeper than the running roots of the building, feral and black. 

Zain’s head whips to follow the projection of the sound, and finds the creature’s head hasn’t strained from its low and pendulum exam of the room, mouth still parted wetly, blood dried to browns and blacks around its lips. The words seem impossible to have dripped from the hidden tongue, and Zain’s mind reels and revolts. 

_Losing it,_ the inside of his head seems to say, in the same black and feral tone. 

 

As he’s losing it, he can make out the now back-lit figure of the thing moving with deeper intent.  
It’s backing its way out of the room, eyeing Zain once all over before turning and winding a path out the door, and away. 

 

Curiosity has a death grip on his legs, grinding them into movement, and he follows it at a cautious distance, watching it slink into the adjacent room. One of the operating rooms, he notes, but not the one his subject had been wheeled into, not even a day prior.

 

The creature whirls around and makes a sound as soon as Zain crosses the threshold into the room. It’s a chest-deep snarling hiss that chills Zain’s blood inside his veins, and halts his advance. 

It has lowered itself to the ground, legs splayed and kneeling. The things coming out from its back are raised in contrast, spread like tree branches into the air, no longer spindling their way through the currents, but stiff and warning.

It’s eyes are darkened and warning too, pupils like tiny points, boring into Zain. The skin on its neck seems to have flushed and stretched up too, hairs all raised.

 _Guarding,_ Zain realizes. Almost the same body language and defensive stature as an ill-trained dog, salivating over a chunk of marrow. It’s wild and wrong behaviour, and Zain can’t find any reason to it, until his eyes adjust to the windowless room, and settle like dust over its contents. 

Wreckage, more of it, still in the form of desecrated human bodies. 

A doctor lies slumped, half underneath the operating table, perhaps having tried to wedge himself beneath and hide. His gloves are drenched and crimson, surgical mask dotted, as if someone dipped a brush in red and congealing paint, and flicked it. 

Metal bits and pieces, all of them sharp and stainless and dripping lay all over too, and Zain can hear inside his skull the noises they would have made when they fell.

Every strand of nerves inside his head is begging him to flee, but that same sick curiosity has woven itself between his legs, and tripped him into immobility. 

 

Zain’s chest feels all hollow when he finally sees what it is that the creature is keeping, guarding possessively, broken and backed into the corner. 

_“Subject 31,”_ he breathes out, in one wet exhale, sour, on the rocks. 

He slumps to the floor, and finds he’s eye level to the dead doctor, and imagines what he had seen, the view from under the table. 

What could be an estranged twin to the already estranged subject is bent and snapped and coiled on the floor. Unmoving black and worm-shaped tentacles lay across the tiles, and Zain can see they’re hooked at the ends, and finely scaled.

Dark hair lays matted and curling across a crooked skull, and it’s neck an open mess of exposed tendons, and drained veins. It’s naked, tattered shreds of an operating room garb lying like cheese cloth beneath its torso, all bloodied and muscled and dotted with congealing black bruises.

Zain tries to look away, but finds it impossible, eyes stretching wide until the edges seem to crack and dry, and he’s finally forced to blink, grateful and nauseous. 

 

⌘

 

“We’re keeping them separate as an added precaution,” someone is saying to Zain. He blinks again, eyes feeling far away from his body, or sunken deep inside. He’s in the past again, reliving some relevant memory. 

“We don’t need them being contaminated by external influences before we’ve observed them in a neutral state.” 

“Of course,” Zain replies, as if it’s elementary information. Inside his head, he’s reeling, choking back vomit, gasping for breath.

“Subject 31 is being kept down the south corridor. We ask that you stay away from the borders. We suspect the scent may be an irritant. Might inhibit progress.” 

“Certainly,” Zain replies again. “I’ll keep my distance.” 

And he does. The entire laboratory team insure the separation of the remaining subjects, the corridors transforming into something resembling a lax quarantine zone.

⌘

He doesn’t lay eyes on Subject 31, or his handler, Admin LP again, until he finds their corpses, fast forwarded to present time, their blood caught in the treads of his shoes, shadowing him as he backs from the room.

 

“He was a threat.” 

Zain flinches so violently he can hear his jaw grind down and powder his teeth inside his jaw. It’s not Subject 26’s voice anymore, but a granite-ground husk of tongue and bone. Nails on chalkboard, one thousand decimals down. 

He certain the voice was something truly out loud this time, shaped with a smokey tongue, all muscle and saliva. 

“You - ” he tries to speak and then stops himself, shaking, hands stiff as death by his sides, fingers pinned in place.

“He was a threat,” the creature repeats, and now Zain can see the movement of its lips, over enunciating, pulled back over teeth. 

“He was...” Zain repeats numbly, watching as he in turn is watched, by large and golden eyes, trapping him like caged vermin. 

“I didn’t have a choice,” the creature says, and the marvel of his voice has Zain transfixed. It’s a rich and stony sound, grating and sanded down. It’s not Niall’s voice, and it is, like some dark velveteen weight has been overlaid atop his vocal cords.

 

“You came for him,” Zain breathes, finally finding himself able to shape words again. “You hunted him down.”

“What choice did I have,” the creature responds. His tone is like ice, biting and frosted. 

“You didn’t have to kill him,” Zain finds himself saying. He feels juvenile as he words it. Piteous and whining. 

“And have him kill me? Or would you have protected me.” the creature says smoothly, words digging just beneath Zain’s surface, and chilling him to the core. Permafrost. 

“We could have kept you apart,” Zain says, and he can feel the pathetic shake of his tongue, shaping his tone with tremors. 

“You did keep us apart. I could feel his thoughts crawling through the walls to reach to me. I could taste his desire to end me - on the edges of my tongue when I slept.” 

“That’s - ” Zain cuts himself short, voice dropping, and lets a breath flutter through his lungs. “Is that something you can do, now? You can hear thoughts?” Just after he asks, Zain wonders dimly if this is what it’s like, to truly lose his mind, feeling simple curiosity and scientific study creep into his brain and infect his tone. Wonder and interest painting over fear and instinct.

 

“I can feel them,” the creature whispers back. “I can feel the intentions of those around me. I can feel their instinctual need to put me down, like some stray on muddied streets.”

“Is that why - ” Somehow Zain can’t manage to shape the question, and voice aloud the destruction the creature has caused. His skin prickles and tightens, frozen muscle deep, rattled with the sudden knowledge that the thing is so aware of what it’s done, and so without apologies. 

“They weren’t rushing in to save me,” that creeping, cold voice says, and shakes Zain inside of his silence. “They came in armed. They were aiming at me.” 

“We could have sedated you - ” Zain tries. It’s useless, an attempt at pointless consoling. 

“Death,” the creature counters. “I could smell it coming for me, and I had a choice, like they had a choice when they came for me.”

“What choice did they have,” Zain says, practically mute, voice filed down to a stump inside his mouth.

“All I did was finalize their decision.” It’s cold and cruel and Zain can’t see any of the subject he had prepared in the thing before him. Until he blinks and finds himself standing in the shoes of his past self once more. 

⌘

“How are you feeling today? Anything to report?” Zain asks. It takes the place of a cordial greeting, but he knows that subject 26 can sense the weight of it. The friendliness he’s not allowed to show. 

“I’m having trouble remembering things,” the subject says after a small silence, and Zain feels the tugging of a frown threatening the passive neutral state of his expression. 

“What kinds of things?” he asks. His hands fly to find a clipboard with his daily notes. So far they’ve all been jotted lines of positive outlooks, and things going as planned, unlike the numbers of others whose systems failed. He hasn’t been looking forward to recording any signs of his subject heading down that route too. So far, there have been none. 

“Little things. Names of streets I used to know. The house I grew up in - can’t seem to place what it looked like. Had a dog when I was a kid. Can’t think of her name.” He chooses this moment to look up at Zain, and there’s more of that carefully held back fear. A shimmering gloss over the baby blue, and Zain takes control over his expression, and emotions again.

“Memory loss is to be expected, fluctuating from mild to severe in between doses. It’s nothing to be concerned about, provided you can remember why you’re here,” Zain says. He wonders if it sounded as rehearsed as it felt.

“Volunteered, didn’t I,” the subject says, and it’s the closest Zain has heard his voice to being dull. “Wanted to make a difference. Help make a breakthrough.”

“And you are helping,” Zain says, changing the measure of the IV, and noting the change down on his paper. “We’re getting closer to a breakthrough every day.” Inside his chest, he feels heavy. Worry, and what slimes its way into being something dangerously close to guilt, a heartache through his day. 

⌘

Zain can feel that something has broken through. Something in his own mind, perhaps, snapping thinly through his reality, or sense of reason. He thinks dimly he may have gone into shock, simply reacting to things, and wandering as if in a daydream. It’s the closest thing he has to reasoning why he’s following a murderous creature out into a corridor, tracking blood from the soles of his shoes, gummy along the floor tiles. 

He stops himself, feet greasing to a halt, and he tries to breathe, letting the thing weave its path down the hall, avoiding the patches of sunlight brave enough to cast down, in on them.

 

Gravity finally catches to Zain on rusted wheels, wheezing. He blinks, after going too long without, and his eyes feel crusted over, baked and dry. He dawns on him - not so much early morning light, but oozing sores breaking open - that he hasn’t seen the thing that seemed to lead him from the room, in several minutes. Or hours. His grasp of time feeling oozing too, pus clogging and weighting down the second hand, and slowing the clock. 

 

He toys, briefly, with the idea of arming himself with the weapons scattered throughout the rooms, discarded by corpses. 

He imagines tracking the thing down, and wonders if it’s something he could do. Find it, stop it if he can. He knows, he can feel inside his marrow, that there’s nothing he could do to stop the creature. His fingers would freeze up on the trigger, he’s sure of it. Too craven to sink a needle into a sweet spot. 

He’s not sure the veins are even in the same places as they used to be. He douses the notion with gasoline, and strikes a match.

As soon as the thought slides limply from his skin, a pressure in the air changes. Some slight atmospheric shift, and he pivots slowly on damp and red-stained treads. 

The subject is there, held in shadows in the gap of the doorframe, and Zain can feel the realization seep into his skull; it had never left him. It had gotten into his head again - with wormlike hooks that spun him around, casting him back into thought. Buried itself in the sand to observe him. 

The same hooks catch hold again, and Zain finds his head tipped back, faced straight, away from the subject.

He can feel monster breath on his back, and he shakes, and waits for something to sink into his skin. 

What finally comes is a dull and damp pressure to his lower spine. A push, and he turns his head a fraction of an inch, the tendons in his neck pushing too, twisting for a sideways look behind him. 

The creature has its knuckles extended, pressing the ridges into Zain’s back. It’s a coarse movement, and Zain doesn’t know how to respond. 

“Violence wasn’t my intention.” The voice accompanies the breath, and Zain finds his skeleton sagging, humming in compliance as it speaks. 

“They were your friends, and your colleagues.” The rough slide of a tendril ropes its way around to his midsection, and lingers briefly, before twisting and tasting through the air around them. Something inside Zain’s torso twists and bends, like a shift and rearrangement of organs.

“What is this?” Zain asks. The words stutter out like chipped teeth.

“An apology,” comes the grating and rippled reply. 

⌘

In the oddly hued eyes fixed intently on his own, Zain is finding pieces of the subject he recognizes. 

They’re positioned on clean floor tiles. Zain kneeling, and the creature held in a stiffly bent crouch. Zain isn’t sure the creature can kneel at all - the joints in its knees are different, thicker in muscle, and not quite bending in the same way as before. 

Zain’s insides still feel coiled tight and pulsing, but he pushes down the sensation, and finds his hands and words are struggling, and reaching out for the creature before him. It remains immobile for now, and Zain thinks it might be readying itself for a pounce. The tendrils snaking through the air still feel dangerous to him, as if they’re painting ripples through time, and soaking his mind with fluid. 

“I don’t know how to reverse the operation,” Zain feels his tongue saying. “I don’t even know if sedatives would work on you.” The creature is staring at him intently. Outside, above and around them, the daylight is failing, and the pale ash of blue is leaving the creature’s eyes. 

“So it’s something to be expected,” comes the reply. It sounds resigned, with traces of violence clipped around the words. “That they will come for me again.”

Zain feels helpless to respond. His spine is aching, asking him to appease the body in front of him, but it seems lethal to lie. 

“When will they come.” It’s a simply worded demand to answer.

“I don’t know,” Zain says. His voice feels suddenly hushed, caught in a strange nostalgic lapse inside the room, as if some deeper, subconscious piece inside his head is still running backwards and remembering. 

“And they will kill me.” There’s no question this time, and Zain watches as the creature moves on the tiles. As he watches, it lays down, spines shifting to what are surely painful angles underneath itself.

“I didn’t mean to,” it whispers, and Zain finds his own body stretching down to map along beside it. “It was as if something woke, from deep inside and tore out of me,”

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised if what awoke were the human pieces,” Zain says. The words come out in a wet whisper, and he finds he can’t sweep them back up, too sodden, soaking into the floor tiles. He rests his skull against the floor.

“I didn’t enjoy it,” the creature says. A singsong of a sigh. “So perhaps nothing too human is left.” Zain doesn’t want to believe it, and presses his limbs down into the tiles, hoping that the lower position will keep the thoughts from finding him. 

 

He shuts his eyes, and finds himself swept up in someone else’s dream. 

⌘

It starts all green. Rolling hills and sea foam making its way to collect between stones on a greyscale beach. Animals dotting distant fields, and his legs - someone else’s remembered legs - running, racing against the wind, a smile stretched against his face.

Then, a girl by his side, just outside some well-lit, and noisy venue. Her face hovering an awkward inch above his own, and she’s waiting, cheeks tinted pink, and he moves his mouth in to touch hers, just once. 

He’s in a hospital next. Blood extractions, the freezing shock of a stethoscope. Something filled out paperwork in the corner. 

And then Zain recognizes the long drive to the facility. It’s not scenic, even in someone else’s memory. There’s terror, also someone else’s, held like a songbird inside his ribs. It’s wings are flapping in panic, an irregular beat. 

Everything in white and clean and noiseless, and there are tubes and cords attached to his arms and legs and metallic patches like leeches on his chest. 

Then he’s looking at his own face, haloed by yellow sunlight, and a sudden swarm of warmth and comfort finds him, and makes a home inside his chest. Calm and also noiseless, but in a different way, a small smile held like a secret at the corners of his own lips. Through another’s eyes, Zain finds peace, and shuts his eyes inside his dream.

 

He opens them again, and can only see red. 

He raises his hands into his line of vision and finds they’re not his hands. Or, not the hands of the other he was dreaming through. Instead, they’re lined with bulging and toxic veins, sticking out all grey and purple. 

A scream is fighting its way out his throat, and when it surfaces, it bubbles into a wet roar that shakes through his skeleton. The fear is back, the uncertainty, but beneath that, ribbons of burning rage, adrenaline shooting like stars and bullets through his skull. 

Something is moving, something large and living in the corners of his eyes, and he wheels, and finds the something jumping out at him, all weight and heat and fury. 

It collides with his body, jaw extending and teeth itching for his throat. 

Something is tearing the skin of his back wide open, and he can feel the clenching release of points and awfulness. Black scaled tentacles escape and gasp into the air, and scramble to latch onto his attacker. 

His eyes scream shut and his vision cuts out, like a bad signal. 

 

Zain awakes, and isn’t sure he’s himself at all. 

⌘

Sleep catches up to him again, a little after he wakes in the cold room. The creature is still stretched along the floor beside him. In the failing light, Zain’s eyes find the holes in its body. He can still feel the hands and scales digging in with every exhale, as if the rival subject had managed to penetrate his own skin, just in shared memory. Long gouges run parallel to each other along the sculpted torso, and four small puncture wounds on its neck are still weeping something rust coloured as the creature breathes, eyelids pale and closed. 

Zain wonders if it’s going to die in its sleep. He wonders if he will too, and falls back into it. 

 

He’s somewhere dark, held in stale air that prickles his skin to life. His shoulders are shaken, held by twisted hands that seem insistent, and the unsettled feeling in his guts and organs feels ripe and griping. 

The subject is crouched over him, but its face has changed again, this time a mimicry of the man’s from Zain’s memories, soft and sweet and painted in soft strokes of fear, and carefully concealed nerves that raise like bumps on his skin. 

The man is whispering intently, emergency lights from the hall gleaming in the whites of his eyes.

 _“We don’t have much time,”_ he’s saying, and Zain feels his own body raising to meet him in the shadows. _“Please, won’t you do this for me?”_

The lighting changes; a spotlight is sweeping past the skylights, and Zain can feel the man’s breath humid and scared on his neck while their eyes follow the path of the lights. 

When Zain looks back, the man’s face has changed again. Now it’s pulled taunt again, paler and ridged, the shape of the skull changing behind his skin. It looks like it hurts, and Zain’s hands raise from his sides to cradle the tortured face. His own hands look different too, slighter, with an air of delicacy, and a gentleness they didn’t possess before.

There’s a noise, next. A siren, air raid and fire and red alert, and Zain jumps, flinching away from the man, or the creature, crouched above him. The violent start shakes a ripple into his mind, a wave of feeling that seems to come from the figure atop him. He can imagine the look of rejection on the strange creature’s face, and he inches back into the embrace.

The sirens and the searchlights stop, vanishing the way things do in dreams, and the resemblances die too. The young man who came in to sign paperwork is gone, and so is the scientist, struggling to keep his feelings locked down. In their place is a gore-stained creature, with eyes that stare above the stars, into some dark passage in the sky, and a bloodied vertebrate, too ambitious to be saved.

 

There’s a weight pulling down on Zain’s chest, and the creature lets out of breath of air from inside its lungs. It lowers itself onto Zain’s body, pressure applying to his hips, and his legs kick out to the sides to accommodate. 

The roping tendrils feel more dry than the wet scales he had been expecting, and imagining. They come gripping and griping, roughing up the edges all along Zain’s body. The touch is more possessive than tender, and the smell of hot salt and cold air breaks out. 

Zain closes his eyes, feigns tenderness until his body believes it, and goes slack.

⌘

The morning comes on, and relief comes with it. 

 

Zain wakes and finds his hands already exploring the wrong-feeling that’s latched itself to his body. But underneath and around the wrongness is a cool gel-like sort of calmness. A fabricated serenity falling slippery around his bones. 

His hands discover something - sharp and small protrusions of skin are catching on the tattered ruins of his shirt, and when he lifts the shreds of fabric away, he sees the skin beneath has gone all red and angry, raised like skin tags, and damp at the tips.

 

He doesn’t feel the presence of the creature in the same ways he had before - something dark and dangerous, and bleakly alien nearby. Instead he feels something nervous inching out for company. As his eyes blear fully open, he finds a figure there beside him in the room, and when his eyes fall across the body, it stirs, smaller and shaking.

 

“Zain?” It’s a breath of a whisper, voice shaken out of sorts, confused and dim. A strained and tinny laugh trickles out of Zain’s mouth in response to his first thought - to correct him with a sternly worded _‘Admin ZH,’_ just the way he’d been instructed to. 

 

“Niall?” he says instead, voice mimicking the near silence and confusion of the other’s tone. It’s the first time his tongue has shaped the name and spat it out allowed, and it tastes like metal and cold air. 

“What’s happened to me?” His - its - mouth is twisting at the corners, ragged and wet. “What have they done to me?” 

Zain tries to answer, tries to dig around his scrambled brains for an answer, and his hands come up bloody and dry. An emptiness descends on him them. He should have an answer. He should know, having done the research, carried out the tests, analyzed the results. He knows the process, the chemicals, the end results. But the _why_ to it all seems lost and far away to him, the explanation teasing the edges of his tongue, then vanishing back down his throat. 

And then; 

“Oh, god, what have they done to _you?”_

Zain can feel the way the blue and golden eyes are slipping and caressing the shapes of his body. The alien swell of breasts beneath his ruined buttoned shirt, the extension and curvature of his spine. The ache in his torso has spread warmly down through his hips too, and they seem to have expanded, spread like toes in too-large shoes. 

It’s a change that’s worm-holed its way through all of his body, his cells and chromosomes all different and wiring into something else. 

Zain doesn’t have the heart, amid his off centered and shifting organs, to tell him that it wasn’t them that implanted this change in him. This beating heartbeat, eggshelled change inside his sternum. 

Instead, he breathes. The tendrils on the back of the young man before him seem to be wilting and decaying, like the branches of petrified trees, scared and brittle and preparing to snap off.

An interesting development, Zain thinks. A bizarre evolutionary path, but nothing new, for the implanter of seeds to complete its life cycle after impregnation.

He finds he has muttered some of that out loud, and as the man’s eyes return to a powder blue, they fill with a slowly awakening terror. 

Zain’s own hands come to rest on his abdomen. 

He can’t place if it’s inside his head again, or truly outside the building, like a savior, and a death sentence, but the sirens and searchlights are back.


End file.
